Studies estimate that 70 percent of family wealth is lost by the end of the second generation and 90 percent by the end of the third generation. To help your loved ones avoid becoming part of this statistic, you need to educate and update your extended family about your wealth transfer goals and the plan you have put in place to achieve these goals.
Asking someone to serve as your fiduciary (trustee of your trust or personal representative or executor under your last will and testament) is not something that you should take lightly. Serving as a fiduciary is a heavy responsibility that requires significant time and effort. If you plan to nominate a family member or friend to serve in one or both of these roles, you will need to consider whether you should authorize them to be compensated from the trust or estate for the services they provide to the trust beneficiaries or heirs of the estate.
You may have signed a financial power of attorney (POA) that allows one or more people to act on your behalf if and when you become unable to act for yourself. However, a financial POA is not valid in certain situations. Knowing when your POA will not be recognized is an often-overlooked aspect of estate planning. To ensure that you have anticipated every contingency, you should discuss with your estate planning attorney the POA exceptions noted in this article.
When reading through a will or trust agreement, you may see language that grants a right to an individual to purchase certain property from the estate or trust at “fair market value.” At first glance, this phrase may seem a perfectly reasonable method of setting a suitable purchase price for a property to be sold at a later date. But a recent court case out of Virginia teaches an important lesson to those who have a will or a trust that relies solely on the term “fair market value” to set a future price of property.
Many of us do not start thinking about life insurance until we get our first full-time job and the company’s human resources representative asks us if we want to enroll in the employer’s group life insurance policy. Most people think “Why not?” and sign up, naming a family member as the beneficiary of their policy, and then never give it another thought. Although this may be a good start, too few of us spend much more time thinking about life insurance.
An important element of creating an estate plan is choosing a responsible party to handle your legal, medical, and financial affairs if you become unable to manage them yourself (i.e., ...
Starting a new job is an exciting new chapter in your life. Depending on your company’s onboarding process, there can be a lot of moving parts. You may feel overwhelmed by the introduction and review of the many different types of employee benefits. Not only are there forms to be filled out, they need to be filled out properly to ensure that your true financial and estate planning wishes are carried out.
When you met with an attorney a few weeks ago, perhaps all you expected was a simple will. Maybe you thought that, with your situation, the work should be easy and the documents should be few. But now that you have finished working with the attorney, your parting gift is a heavy binder filled with hundreds of pages. You may be wondering, “Why is my trust so long?”
One storyline trope in Hollywood movies is the rich father disinheriting the family outcast. The story usually traces the child’s attempts to win the father over and be considered a part of the family again. But can fiction imitate reality? Can you actually disinherit a child? The answer, in most circumstances, is yes. You can disinherit a child under most states’ laws, but you must understand the limitations and additional factors if you are considering this option.
The chances of a married couple dying in a common accident or within a very short time of one another are probably quite slim. However, it does happen. And it happens frequently enough that most states have laws to address the issue and the problems that can arise from simultaneous deaths. What are these laws, why do we need them, and can we work around them if we need to?